The moral of the story, in the Tex/Latex/Xelatex world, is that it is solvable.

Given the traditional Chinese woodblock printing style, from top-down, right-to-left, the typesetting algorithm puzzle to solve is: given a string of characters, what is the formula for sequentially printing them Chinese-style into a w x h grid starting from the top left corner as column 1 row 1?

Answer: (w – c) * h + r

The symmetry group is almost quark-like if a third dimension were to be added.

Conjecture: Any (ordered) arrangement of locations, whether characters on a page, vertices in a crystal, or gluons in a glob, would have the same underlying mathematics.

The TBRL result, using the Chinese Wikipedia article on the star Achernar (水委一, shuǐ wěi yī) as an excerpt source (mid-March 2018 version; it has since been edited), is:

“River End Prime is a …”

Obviously, the next step is that punctuation etc needs to be made auto-adjusting, but that is solvable too.

TeX is very good at horizontal typesetting, and can even do quite good vertical typesetting by the knack of using fonts with rotateable glyphs, setting the page with its usual glue and stretchable spaces, then rotating the entire page 90 degrees.

Doing vertical typesetting by hand, so to speak, should also be possible.

Here follows an attempt:

Draw a grid, then position the characters by trial-and-error adjustments:

It would be more convenient to have all the adjustments and positioning built-in, so to speak, and that can be done in the Tikz package by naming the text nodes methodically and then populating them (manually at first, later by a macro loop):

Looking up 无 in a Japanese dictionary was never going to work, but it took a few moments to work that out.

无 (pronounced wú, meaning nothing) is a simplified Chinese character. The traditional form, 無, is in Japanese (and pronounced む mu). A good way to remember it is as a sheaf of wheat sitting on the fire, becoming nothing pretty quickly. It functions much like the Greek privative a-, like a general-purpose un– or non-.

If there was a writing system, with all the letters (let’s assume an alphabetic system) similar to each other, the word shapes would be strenuous to discern from each other.

Example:

(A simplistic substitution-cipher for: ‘The cat sat on the mat and the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’, using various i and t glyphs, and one or two l’s, down at the Latin supplement end of things.)

Where the letter shapes are less similar, it becomes slightly easier to recognise word shapes:

(Same cipher, using random letters from random scripts.)

By comparison, cursive writing, Russian-style, in English:

and in Russian (from the beginning of the Wikipedia article on the solar system):

The conjecture arises that a similar shape-recognition process could be in play for concepts, where nearby concepts on the concept spectrum are interchangeable with each other.

Certainly, a linguistic similarity causes confusion: year versus light-year, Acacia versus Cassia, Lake Constance versus Lake Mungo, etc. And across languages, too, as the false-friends of the translator’s world testify.

Contrariwise, a linguistic difference should make it easy to classify two things as different when they are not (barring some familiarity with the subject matter and a binding classification scheme): up and down (quarks); duck and dodo (birds).

And a third variation tries to make two different things the same by calling them by the same (or similar) names.

Scriptwriters have an increasing tendency of late, presumably from copying each other, of having their characters say: “It’s only circumstantial”, meaning that the evidence at that stage of the plot development is not strong enough to present a case in court and so the hero has to do something more hero-y to obtain it. In real life, anything that is not direct testimony (from a witness) and which proves another fact that goes to the charge is circumstantial evidence (evidence from the surrounding circumstances, such as the presence of DNA) and is often much stronger than direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence is entirely the opposite of ‘only circumstantial’.

Posts navigation

Text Widget

This is a text widget. The Text Widget allows you to add text or HTML to your sidebar. You can use a text widget to display text, links, images, HTML, or a combination of these. Edit them in the Widget section of the Customizer.